Red Ribbons
by FictitiousFanfare
Summary: Some people die and other people live. I'd just never expected to do both, let alone living my second life in a place I'd rather not, and as a person who I'd very much prefer not being. (A reincarnate into DGM fic.)


An: A story in which canon is slapped into submission with a medieval mace and cheerfully held hostage until I'm done mangling it. Beware my vague grasp of Victorian history, atrocious understanding of the French language, back-alley canon doctoring, and my weird sense of humour.

Mostly based on the Manga, which means that Jeans father is not the person it was in the anime, due to reasons.

Title may change.

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><p>My death had been very, very, abrupt. The snap surprise of a car smashing into my hip, the crunch of bones and the cars front windshield and I was airborne. I'd have been more amused at the thought of me sailing across the street in the way I had had I not been dying. It'd probably looked very slapstick the way that I'd tumbled head over heels before landing with a bone jarring fleshy thunk on the hard unforgiving tarmac. Or perhaps that was the sheer hysteria of me realising that I was about to kick the bucket.<p>

I rather thought it was the hysteria.

I suppose it had been all my own fault, in the long run.

The trouble I had found with Mediterranean cities was that they all drove like utter madmen. To be a pedestrian was to take your own life in your hands (or possibly into the drivers hands, which was an even worse idea considering the consequences), especially in the tight corners and thin streets of Old Town. Sure it looked pretty, all old buildings made out of ancient plaster and what looks like mud bricks peeking through the whitewash. A place where drivers would rattle down the street in a fashion only ever seen in the police chases in American action movies.

You know the ones – those with screaming tires and everything that dares stand in their way getting mown down like an errant blade of grass.

The occasional explosion.

Screaming.

The works.

I'd been one such blade of grass, in the end.

Mown down without a care in the world.

That the streets themselves clearly hadn't been made with cars in mind didn't faze them and nor – usually – did the relative lack of sidewalks scupper pedestrians. The gaps between houses were themselves far too thin for there to be both sidewalk and actual road coexisting in the same space, and as such you either jammed yourself into the wall or a convenient doorway (hoping desperately that the owner doesn't open said door and send you sprawling either into the house itself or back out into the street) or were mown down my hot metal and heavily tanned drivers who were often seen with one arm out the window.

There was a good reason I'd avoided getting a drivers license – if only because I'd not been overly fond of the idea of picking front dashboard and glass out of myself after the first inevitable crash.

I don't know why I'd decided that walking was a good idea either until I abruptly remembered.

Buses did not come on time. No way in hell did buses come on time, they were either early or late (usually the latter) with no in between.

Even school buses were late and whether it was just traffic or an attempt from the driver to have as many kids sprinting for the hills as soon as he stopped I'd never been able to figure out.

So it was walk or (if you'll pardon the turn of phrase) death by irate parent demanding to know where the hell you've been for the past hour.

(The answer being: stuck in traffic on a rickety, too full bus that was very much not where you'd wanted it to be.)

Death itself was... very much the antithesis of life. Rather than Being, as I had done for the previous two decades of my life I very abruptly... Wasn't.

I wasn't me, or even a person, I was just one small part of something large floating in an indescribable void. There was no sensation, no feeling, no thought, only silence.

Waking up was, in its own way, a relief.

I was used to living, used to being me – to having thoughts and feelings, used to the feeling of the air and breathing it in, used to the feel of the ground – of cloth – on my skin.

This is not to say that I didn't howl my lungs out.

While Living was infinitely preferable to being Dead you don't usually experience such a strong sensory bomb. Everything was too loud, textures scraped across my nerves like fine wire across a nerve, the sound of even my very own heartbeat was deafening, and in the Silence I had even forgotten the taste of the inside of my own mouth.

That I seemed to lack teeth only confused me even more.

Screaming hurt, the muscles that I needed to scream in the first place ached, and the scream itself rang across my ears.

I'd screamed louder.

And then I'd remembered that I'd _died_.

In some ways it's a blessing it was quick. Of all the various fashions I theorised I could die, quick was one of the more preferable ones. I'd hate to drown.

Altogether I'd still much have preferred it to not happen at all.

It is only blearily that I realise that I can't move, being stuck as I was in a veritable cocoon of (what I thought at the time to be) horrible scratchy cloth. My sight is even more bleary – something that I'd blame on my lack of glasses if I hadn't remembered being able to see far better than this a minute (or small eternity) ago.

I'd never been this blind in my life! Everything was murky and far, far too bright, light and colour swimming around in a dizzying fashion.

I howled some more in disgust, trying valiantly to extract myself from the pink blob that appeared to be weighing me down.

Everything was sluggish, my head moving as if it had been weighed down with sacks of flour.

It was only then, head bobbing drunkenly as I tried to look around, that I abruptly realised that some of the deafening noise around me had been somebody talking. It sounded soothing, if still deafening, like someone was trying to calm down a young child or baby with senseless dithering.

Let in not be said that I can't take two and two together and make twenty two.

Reincarnation.

Perhaps the abrupt death and suddenly waking up again practically blind and bawling my eyes out could have meant something else but this was the first conclusion that I came to.

Which is not to say it made sense.

Very little did at that point, everything too loud or too sharp.

I was not terribly unfamiliar with the concept of reincarnation, although I had never put much thought into it as it hadn't felt all that relevant. For one I'd been largely agnostic, and not attached to any one religion. I wasn't too sure about gods either, although it was probably safe to be respectful and avoid mortally offending the unearthly entities who could probably blast me if they so felt like it.

I thought it was a smart thing to do.

Self preservation and all that.

Very sensible.

I couldn't quite remember exactly which belief Reincarnation belonged to. It felt fairly eastern, the west being fairly focused on there being a specific place that you went to after you died – whether it was Hades' Underworld or Heaven or Hell. Even then (if it had applied to me in the first place) I suppose I'd always assumed I would have a good number of years ahead of me.

I hadn't though, which made me feel rather stupid in retrospect.

Apparently my ego was larger than I'd thought, having immediately assumed that I would have been one of those lucky enough to live long happy lives.

It takes months to get over my death and subsequent jump from fully grown adult to screechy infant, and in a way I was glad that I'd been stuck as a tiny baby for the whole of that time.

I'd never felt so distressed, so lost, but babies were, as far as I knew, loud little things. As such it wasn't all that strange for me to have been screaming, wasn't abnormal or strange, which it most definitely would have been had I come back a bit older.

...

Assuming that such a thing was possible, of course.

If reincarnation (or rebirth) into a baby was possible why not that too?

I'd never know.

I hoped.

Dying once was bad enough. At least staying dead meant that it wouldn't hurt when I re-emerged into existence.

Perhaps three months into what I could only describe as post-Death depression (in which I questioned everything, from why I'd been the one to die, what my family were doing, what would happen to the book I'd been writing, and the fates of my numerous cats) I finally got over myself and took to contemplating my new life instead.

I wondered when I was, my relative blindness not giving me much to work with. From their speech however (my hearing having abruptly cleared up maybe three weeks into my new life) I could gather that I wasn't in the 21st century any more.

Sure they cooed at me in the apparently universal baby-talk (all high pitched and smushing words in a way that I marvelled at the fact that we learnt to speak properly in the first place). And it was thankfully English (something that I praised to high heaven, having been abysmal at learning languages when I'd been alive the first time) but the dialect was quite a bit older.

As in those old classic books that English classes insisted you read – those old stuffy things like Pride and Prejudice and the French Lieutenants Woman (which I'd despised to a degree that I can't quite describe – to the point that my teacher had been forced to bribe me with a colossal chocolate bar to get me to read it at all) – old.

It was admittedly easier to understand than Shakespearian English had been, but still.

Back when I could actually speak more than babyish gibberish, I spoke too quickly, and with a peculiar accent (dropping letters and whole chunks of words like hot potatoes), often interspaced with gratuitous (if unintentional) swearing and the more modern dialect that had evolved after the World Wars and Americanism.

There were so many words I couldn't use in a Victorian setting. 'Cool', for one, was out of the question, being firmly World War Two. There were probably hundreds upon thousands of inventions and discoveries I couldn't reference because they hadn't even been invented.

Was plastic a thing yet?

There was a decent chance I was part of a proper Christian family this time around too (Christianity being practically fashionable from what little I'd remembered from my history lessons), which meant sitting around on hard pews being bored stiff.*

How... fun.

Above all else in this life I dearly hoped that I was male. Not that I hadn't been previously but if I remembered, coming back as a woman had been something of a punishment? Did not belonging to the faith that the concept of reincarnation belonged to ensure I'd come back female?

I hoped not.

The idea of being a woman in this life – in what I assumed to be the Victorian Era - terrified me. The thought of being married off because I'd never be worth anything more than a housewife and for producing my husbands heirs rankled something fierce.

Manners and etiquette looked stifling (even the men bound by peculiar rules and unspoken law, but still nothing to the sheer volumes of stuff that women had to deal with). If I was high class (and I was fairly decently off if the women in black clothing who occasionally looked after me meant what I thought they did) I'd have to know about society, about how to eat properly and in a polite fashion – as well as what fork was for what and what spoon to use with desert and which to use with soup.

Corsets were health hazards – and the idea of wearing frilly dresses with hundreds of different layers and needing at least one other person to do it up in the back. Was. Not. Appealing.

I was educated, science and geography and mathematics. I was well read. Both things that were frowned upon in a decent woman of the time. While admittedly I could knit and make lace (the fruits of my one year spent being home schooled and my mother deciding to give it a shot), the idea of doing little else...

I didn't like it.

I clung tightly to the knowledge that pink (the colour of my blanket) had been a masculine colour in the 19th century. Something to do with Hitler, the holocaust, and pink triangles (or was it squares? It may have been stars) pinned on Homosexuals uniforms.

Please let me be male.

Please, please, please.

Unfortunately I couldn't be sure of my gender until I wasn't stuck in the straightjacket that was the infants swaddling cloth.

I spent a few long minutes musing over how it was meant to prevent me from scratching my eyes out or something. That or posture, and I spent several more minutes wondering how on earth being tied up was meant to help with posture.

I spent a great deal of time thinking. The swaddling was the least of it, and I spend an absurd amount of time panicking over the thought of all the rules I'd have to learn if I was female. Several gaps between naps were spent contemplating the universe itself, which quickly swung into being dreadfully depressing and was quickly abandoned lest I terrorise my family even more.

It was that or...

Silence.

Just the silence and the universe pressing down on me.

I quickly discovered that the silence, where once it wouldn't have bothered me, now terrified me. I'd never exactly liked it, preferring to listen to music or something like that, but it had been tolerable.

Death had left its mark and Silence deafened.

It pressed downwards and inwards from all sides to the degree that it hurt. If there had been a clock in my room I'd have at least been able to focus on it's tick, tick, ticking, but no such luck.

I was a very clingy baby.

I'd scream if I was left alone for too long, howling for attention from someone - anyone. Most of the time it was the maids who answered me, two cheery faced women in their long black dresses and ruffled aprons, who would wander in from their various duties to quiet me. My sight still hadn't sharpened too much even after four months so I couldn't be entirely sure even then.

(How I was fed didn't need thinking about and I had, in fact, promptly purged it from my memory. Surrogate is all I'll say about it and not a word more.)

Sometimes... sometimes it was my mother.

I think. She seemed motherly, and the only woman I'd seen besides the people who I'd assumed were the maids.

Never my father, who I'd only seen a handful of times – that was assuming that the man who had occasionally loomed over my cot in the earlier days as I bawled was my father. He'd vanished at maybe month two and I hadn't seen him since.

He looked, even to the fuzziness of my infant eyes, like an incredibly strict and serious man, his dark eyebrows pinched and furrowed in what appeared to be a permanent frown. I'd squeaked up at him once, perhaps the one time he'd actually picked me up - senseless baby babble from my undeveloped vocal chords providing ample commentary as I inspected his chin. He'd not said a word and all too soon I'd been carefully placed right back where I'd come from.

My mother, from what I could tell from our few interactions, is an incredibly kind woman. With her soft round face, dark brown hair, and wide blue eyes she is also quite pretty in a vaguely fragile fashion. Sickly too, if the slightly too warm stickiness of her too pale skin and how flushed her face was any indication.

I had probably not been the best for her health, having me, and I spent a moment worrying over it before I was swiftly distracted by a finger bopping me on the nose.

"Such a serious expression." She cooed in an accent that felt distinctly familiar, although I couldn't immediately place it. She laughed at my petulant expression, a soft breathy little chuckle very much unlike my previous mothers hearty laugh.

(I felt a stab of homesickness.)

"So serious like your father," she continued, humming a little melody that I abruptly recognised from my old French classes, back when taking languages had been mandatory and not an option (I'd had to take French and Greek, and hated every second. That my first French teacher had been Russian and impossible to understand – what with her accent - hadn't helped the situation whatsoever). I didn't remember the words, it'd had been well over five years and however many months I'd been stuck swaddled tightly in this thick pink fabric, but I seemed to recall it was some sort of lullaby.

"So serious, mon chou, Jean."

Jean.

I could be a Jean.

Although I had no idea what on earth she was talking about with the cabbage.*

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><p>*I'm not actually attempting to make a stab at Christianity here, and I apologise in advance if that's how it comes across, Jean just happens to take an incredibly dim view to anyone attempting to dictate how he should think and feel.<p>

*Jean also knows pretty much jack about French besides a few words. He couldn't speak a grammatically correct sentence to save his life but he'd probably get what you were talking about by putting individual words together, making a wild stab in the dark as to what the heck you're talking about, and hoping for the best.

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><p>Fun Fact corner –<p>

Pink -Pink being feminine is indeed a product of the concentration camps, where Homosexuals were identified with pink patches on the fronts of their uniforms. It is entirely Hitlers fault that the girls isle in any store is a pink abomination on the eyes. Curse you for this assault on my eyeballs. Previously it was masculine as it was a variation of red which was considered a strong masculine colour. Blue was colder, more demure, and thus feminine.

Dress Code - Victorian women needed several dresses, and had whole rule books devoted to telling them exactly how they were supposed to dress at any time of day and in any situation. Whether you wore dark or pale gloves in winter, exactly what kind of dress you had to wear if you were taking a walk in winter as opposed to autumn and whatnot. It's all very complicated and utterly absurd to look back on.

Vocabulary - In English to call somebody mad is to call them insane – rather than angry as it is commonly used nowadays. This is probably due to a misunderstanding regarding the word maddening. 'A persons behaviour is maddening' implies that they are acting so stupidly that they're making the person watching feel insane themselves, although they more often just seem angry. (This is an assumption based on my knowledge of the English language and may be wildly incorrect.) 'Pissed' also does not mean angry. It means drop dead drunk. So there's that.


End file.
